The plant wilt pathogen Ralstonia solanacearum thrives in the water-transporting xylem
vessels of its host plants. Xylem is a relatively nutrient-poor, high-flow environment but R …

Niches are spaces for the biological units of selection, from cells to complex communities. In
a broad sense,“species” are biological units of individuation. Niches do not exist without …

The accrual of genomic data from both cultured and uncultured microorganisms provides
new opportunities to develop systematic taxonomies based on evolutionary relationships …

Taxonomy is an organizing principle of biology and is ideally based on evolutionary
relationships among organisms. Development of a robust bacterial taxonomy has been …

Toward the poles, life on land is increasingly dominated by microorganisms, yet the
evolutionary origin of polar microbiomes remains poorly understood. Here, we use …

The main outcome of molecular dating, the timetree, provides crucial information for
understanding the evolutionary history of lineages and is a requirement of several …

Microbial methanogenesis may have been a major component of Earth's carbon cycle
during the Archaean eon, generating a methane greenhouse that increased global …

Strategies to manage plant disease—from use of resistant varieties to crop rotation,
elimination of reservoirs, landscape planning, surveillance, quarantine, risk modeling, and …

Photosystem II is a photochemical reaction center that catalyzes the light‐driven oxidation of
water to molecular oxygen. Water oxidation is the distinctive photochemical reaction that …

Dormancy is a bet‐hedging strategy that allows organisms to persist through conditions that
are suboptimal for growth and reproduction by entering a reversible state of reduced …